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Comment by mxstbr | Hacker News Reader

Having spoken at ~20 international conferences I'm pretty certain people underestimate the work that goes into giving a great talk you'll remember.

This also bugs me when people say "Oh, that person's given this talk at that conference before". Preparing a good talk is a lot of work, and after that's put in why should you not be allowed to give that talk more than one time?

Also only very few people watch conference videos. Giving the same talk a dozen times, by the 10th time maybe a handful of people in an audience of hundreds will have seen the talk before. I'm honestly surprised conferences still record the talks because I'm fairly certain it's not worth the money for them. (there are outliers to this when somebody gives the most amazing talk ever that gets watch millions of times, but how often does that happen?)

I'd much rather conferences invest money into a better experience for the attendees and speakers.

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[author of the linked article here]

I’ll have to disagree here. Using PyCon US as an example since it ended recently:

1. My talk video has already been watched more than 650 times. I don’t think I had that many people in the room.

2. I rarely go to actual talks because as a European, being able to meet my American friends and being able to discuss things IRL is sadly a once-per-year issue. Open Spaces/BoFs are also more valuable IMHO by being present. IOW: now I’m back I’ve started to catch up by watching conf videos. :) As a speaker, I’d prefer people going to talks too of course. Last year I spoke to a 1/3 filled room and it sucked so hard I wasn’t sure I’ll submit another talk.

3. PyCon sells out. Always. It would be a pity to limit all the work to a small minority. Some great talk videos end up iconic too.

4. Plenty people can’t afford conferences at all. Be it money, job, or family responsibilities. Talk videos are a great way to democratize knowledge.

I think point 3 cannot be overstated. Iconic talks can be hugely informative or simple and brilliant in their execution. Two that come to mind and I regularly recommend to people are:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat "Wat" https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1 "F*ck You, Pay Me"

That Mike Monteiro video literally changed my life, helping me go from charging $15/hr for PHP "development" (sigh) to charging real money and getting real checks.

Wat is a great talk two, they're probably my top 2 talk videos.

Some speakers are more willing to give a talk when you record them. On the other hand it depends on the type of conference. There are conferences which are sold out for years and do not need extra money. They want people to be able to see the talk athough they did not win a ticket in the lottery. And this is true for conferences which are very different. Google I/O, Apples WWDC and on the other hand the Chaos Communication Congress. All of them offer recordings for free.

Damn, took me too long to type ;-)

But it's funny that you thought of the exact same conferences when it comes to good recordings with large viewer counts.

please conferences, record your talks. We, online talk watchers do exist. Besides, it's also good marketing material for you for next year, and for your speaker. Thank you

As someone who does conference talks, I'm glad they're recorded. It acts as a useful piece of advertising/credentialising and is also useful for future conference organizers to check to see if they think the way I present will suit them.

Also I'd say I watch quite a lot of conference presentations. there are far too many conferences for me to get along to and in many cases only a small percentage of the talks are interesting to me, so it's very useful to be able to watch the specific talks online.

> Also only very few people watch conference videos.

This is quite often true, but it hugely depends on the conference in question. The annual Chaos Communication Congress for example (well-known international IT security conference in Germany) records all of the talks, which usually have between 500-3k viewers at the venue, and the better ones usually get >10k views, with some top talks even topping 30k-50k over time, on the official recording page of the conference alone (there are quite often copies uploaded to YouTube and other outlets, and those amass similar numbers of views in addition). In addition there is usually a number of streaming viewers who watch the talks as they happen, in the figure of 500-3k.

In this case however the recording quality is generally very good, so that might also explain why other conferences with only mediocre recordings don't reach similar numbers of viewers. And the videos are released under a CC license, so sharing/reuploading/using them in education or similar stuff is all legal.

The WWDC talks most likely also reach high view counts, since many people would like to go to the conference but can't and the talks themselves as well as the recordings are usually of good quality.

The actual official site at https://media.ccc.de/popular has many talks in the hundreds of thousands of views.

Conferences usually have a relatively small number of attendees. By recording the talk you can reach a much wider audience. For example: when I was in college I used to watch lots of conference videos, even if it just had a few thousand views. If there hadn't been videos, I wouldn't have had any way to access the same content. Actually traveling to some of those conferences would've been prohibitively expensive at the time. Heck, even now I find most conferences to be prohibitively expensive.

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